Global Studies Professor Joe Siracusa is chair of CHASS - The Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences - which has just announced it long-list of nominees for its annual book prize. Nominees are:

• The Story of Australia's People Volume 1: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia, by Geoffrey Blainey and published by Penguin Books

• The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia, by Frank Bongiorno and published by Black Inc. Books

• Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather, by Karen Lamb and published by University of Queensland Press

• Australia's Boldest Experiment War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, by Stuart Macintyre and published by NewSouth Books

• Illicit Love Interracial Sex & Marriage in the United States & Australia, by Ann McGrath and published by University of Nebraska Press

• Across the Seas Australia's Response to Refugees: A History, by Klaus Neumann and published by Black Inc Books

• Mannix, by Brenda Niall and published by Text Publishing

• Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific 1939-45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War, by Yorick Smaal and published by Palgrave Macmillan

Our best wishes are with Joe and CHASS as they deliberate on the ultimate winner.